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Pure panic and existential angst: that's the picture you get when you approach makers in the arts personally about the effects of trickle down (the trickle down of corona funding from the government to those makers). The Creative Coalition may be making a fist for them, talking to the minister about it, the institutes debating it, but the creators are silent....
Patricia Goduto (37) was on stage in major Stage Entertainment shows early this century when an old childhood trauma played up and plunged her into a years-long psychosis. Her life changed irrevocably, she became addicted to drugs and alcohol and was declared incurable by her practitioners. Now she has been on stage for a few years, cured of her...
It is perhaps his most ambitious novel to date, and at the same time the first he would rather not talk about. For in De Mitsukoshi Troostbaby Company, writer Auke Hulst (46) broaches a sensitive and personal theme: mourning for an unborn child. Near future The Mitsukoshi Troostbaby Company is a novel as only Auke Hulst writes it....
In the second episode of the podcast KunstZINnig, I talk to art curator and writer Hanne Hagenaars about how art gives meaning to her life: 'Art has deepened and, in a way, saved my life'. Hanne Hagenaars wrote the book 'No Cloud: How Art Saved My Life' in 2016. In this book, she discusses artworks that...
Creating a character you really feel involved with as an audience is what dance maker Sandra Kramerová is rock solid at. Her solo performance Majka drags me along from the start. But precisely because she performs her choreography so strongly, I am left afterwards with the feeling that I am missing something. That's a wonderful experience. It's not going well...
He will not be thanked, the headline above this article. After all, if there is one thing you don't want, it is to give a minister of a Rutte cabinet a compliment. And certainly not one of culture, the sector that, under Rutte's 10-year premiership, suffered the heaviest blows in post-war history. Rutte is the...
Whenever a technology is presented that I am not yet familiar with, I like to explore. A museum with holographic glasses? Do it! However, it turned out to be the content that will stay with me for a long time. The Museum of Austerity by Sarah Wares and John Pring is no easy read. But essential for understanding the impact of austerity on disabled people...
DocLab has been the most exciting part of IDFA for 15 years. This is the place for experimentation in form, technology and content; pushing and stretching the boundaries of the medium. I like to plunge in, sometimes with skin and hair. The VR installation Symbiosis gives that opportunity quite literally. You get to enter a post-apocalyptic world, where people are forced to make connections...
Teun Toebes (22) shares kitchen, bathroom and toilet not with fellow students but with people with dementia. He wrote a book about it: VerpleegThuis. The book came in at number 1 in the Bestseller 60 last week, much to his delight, because Toebes wants to reach as many people as possible with his mission: to change care for people with a faltering brain. 'It...
We are approaching episode 200 of Pearl Radio, a series of audio material that matters. Face of the cultural podcast is independent radio maker Stefanie Visjager. Delving into listening archives, interviewing creators and carrying the audience along in calm storytelling voice are all part of her remit. Since the birth of the term podcast in a 2004 Guardian article, it has been running wild...
IDFA-DocLab is celebrating its 15th anniversary. Leading platform for all kinds of interactive or non-interactive, virtual or physical projects through which artists give us a different window on reality.
As a physicist, Paolo Giordano was deeply concerned about the development of Covid-19. As a writer, he could interpret those feelings of concern and share them with the public. Giordano's articles are collected in What I Don't Want to Forget. 'It would be a sin if all this suffering and all these deaths were in vain.' Aware of the danger When he...
IDFA 2021 will kick off on 17 November. Again largely on location. A pleasant surprise this year is the rich crop of Dutch documentaries.
The Every (The Everything) is the name of a successful and widely loved company, the world's largest combination of a tech giant and a commercial giant. Dave Eggers describes this in his latest novel "The Every", follow-up to bestseller The Circle. On sale from mid-November 2021 at Amazons and Bol.Coms, but those who wanted it earlier could already...
Friends call him brother. His children say daddy. One day he hopes to become a grandfather. Sam Bettens (49) was known worldwide as the lead singer of Belgian band K's Choice when he decided to transition. And now he walks the beach in swimming trunks: 'I never want to hide myself again.' Tomboy As a young girl, Sam Bettens was a tomboy and wore the...
The theatres are struggling to fill up, technicians have hung up their lamps, but tickets are not on sale for Het Nationale Theater's Trojan Wars. So in this long-awaited Nerd podcast (the AVROTROS thinks the tune is really terrible), we talk to Cees Debets, the director of that great theatre company from The Hague. Marijn Lems also happens to have a few...
There is turmoil in the world of circus and open-air theatre as a major workshop cum festival in the famous artist town of Diepenheim loses its director. Ruth Semmekrot, director of Kunsten op Straat Overijssel since 2013, suddenly resigned her post last Friday. In a statement on Facebook, she stated: 'I have struggled. The administrative and political dynamics I was in...
The difference between tricks and art is the transformation. From a two-dimensional canvas into a form with three dimensions, from moving air into emotional music, on a stage from man into woman or vice versa and from a handstand into a liquid abstraction. Transformation where you are live, so it can be done very well in the circus, I experienced last...
The Dutch Slavery Museum has moved a step closer, now that the Arts Council (Amsterdam) and the Council for Culture (Rijk) have issued an opinion on the exploration of a direction group presented earlier this year. This satisfies official procedural due diligence, although establishing the necessary museum in this way seems likely to take at least as much time....
Put three neurotic sisters with their mother hen and errant brothers-in-law together in a parental holiday villa with beautifully translated text by Las Norén and you're bound to get some nasty Scandinavian family stuff. But luckily there is the wafting acquaintance Axel, a convincing role by Mark Rietman. Already at the start of the performance with the tableau de la troupe alongside...
The link between the Orpheus myth and Arnhem potenrammers is more obvious than you might think. At least, if your name is Peer Wittenbols and you are one of the country's best playwrights. That you can also think of accordions as part of that is, in turn, extraordinary. Still, Blood Coral, a performance by accordion duo Toeac, with a lead role for Jack Wouterse on a text that promises...
'The contact you make with your audience as a comedian is the highest thing for me.' When comedian Thjum Arts (1993) started breaking through as a comedian around 2018, he wondered if this was what he really wanted. As a human being, should he really want to talk about himself so much? Studying social work would have...
For RTL-Boulevard reporter Ruud ten Wolde (29), these weeks would be dominated by his book Ill Happy, which comes in at number 1 in the Bestseller 60 this week, in which he writes about his illness and the insights it has brought him. Although he had been ill for six years, he still died suddenly recently. We spoke to him five...
A campfire, primeval hamburgers and flammkuchen with bacon and cream, as well as coffee with oat milk and remarkably many loose buns in Tilburg's Leijpark. White wine, kombucha and speciality beer. Some people get pimples from such combinations, but it felt remarkably good, last Monday at Festival Circolo. The hipster folk, considered super sustainable, mixed effortlessly with the burgundian Brabanter, so in...
His life is a strange journey through time, a giant leap forward from one musical culture to another. His mother was a composer and singer, his father accompanied a relay of famous song singers as a pianist. And Jan-Bas Bollen (1961) took to the stage early on as a promising violin talent. In 1970, a child of nine, he played at the Oscar Back Violin Competition, and...
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